Instantly accessible, incredibly entertaining, and zipping along at the rate of a punk album, Kap Bambino’s Blacklist is a thorough album. Kap Bambino is an electronic French duo, Caroline Marital on vocals and instrumentals by Orion Bouvier, that I stumbled upon on the internet much earlier this year and heard their 2007 lp Zero Life, Night Vision, which is a harsh electronic punk album with some 8-bit influences. Because of their musical tendencies, Kap Bambino will garner instant comparison to Justice and Crystal Castles. However, this quirky, electro-punk duo has been doing this stuff since 2001, and has seemed to steadily improve their craft.

Kap Bambino’s Blacklist is a much more accessible affair than their previous lp Zero Life, Night Vision. Zero Life, Night Vision is a bit noisier, layered with Caroline Marital’s screaming vocals that reminisces of TV static because of it’s lo-fi nature. It’s a renegade punk electronic album that’s full of high-energy, but, because of the noise, most people would miss the intrigue. Blacklist keeps the base of the same recipe of Zero Life, Night Vision, but smooths it out and creates some tracks that are more grander in production. This is due to Orion Bouvier’s expanded range of sounds, such as a spare bass guitar line on “Lezard” or the Monkey Grinder Organ core to “Rezozero.” This album shows that Kap Bambino can keep the experimental punk flavor while making an album that more fans of electro, or similar electronic sub-genres, might have missed on Kap Bambino’s earlier work.

Another difference on Blacklist is that Caroline Marital’s vocals become more recognizible as words, and her french-accent broken english vocals provide the same fun and energy as Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki. On “Batcaves,” Caroline Marital sings “It’s a good time for bat caves” over and over again, that helps to create a quirky, campy fun song.

Blacklist just needs to be listened to. It’s barely over thirty minutes, so there’s not much excuse not to. The only downside to the album is that it stops at barely over thirty minutes, and between most songs there’s a couple seconds of silence that kill the party, but you can use that time to try to digest what assaulted you aurally.